ECN211 Fall 2011 Common Final Exam

Starting in Fall 2009, EMCC's ECN faculty (adjunct and residential) have developed and implemented the common ECN211 (Macroeconomic Principles) final exam. We first started by collaboratively identifiying what we expected all of our students to be able to do as a result of completing our courses, our Learning Objectives (LO) (see attached). We then created multiple choice questions related to each LO (attached), and we all included the questions as part of our independent final exams. Instructors recorded each students' response for each question in an excel spreadsheet and sent to me, who aggregated and analzed the results (See attached). We then each filled out a "Learning Outcomes Improvement Plan" (LOIP), a plan to focus on 3 areas where are students were weakest at and see if we can improve our teaching practices in those areas to improve the scores for next time (see attached). We plan to continue the assessment for the spring 2012 semester, and then to a meta-analysis across semesters to look for LO that scored consistently high or low, to see if they LOs or questions need refinement.

Comments

Great effort, Erik and adjuncts! In creating the assessment, did you use any templates or guides. For example, were efforts made to align the assessment with Bloom's Taxonomy? Multiple choice tests tend to assess only the Recall level . . .

That is a very good point to make, and you are right that the MC questions do focus heavily on recall, though I would argue we have included upper level analysis and evaluate questions as well. We are looking at revamping this over the summer and would like to take a look at creating more ways for students to generate content instead of recognizing the right answer.